Free The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps by William Styron Page A

the pine forests and red earth, the backwoods stores and sluggish tidewater rivers, the whole tormented landscape of that strange world below the Potomac and north of the Rio Grande. But all art forms, of course, generate subforms that are debased and bastardized versions of the original—for every Beethoven ten Karl Gold-marks, for each Messiah , two dozen Dreams of Gerontius —and country music is no exception. At its worst—usually found in its scherzo mood—it is an abomination of synthetic rhythms and bumpkin lyrics, all of it glutinously orchestrated with cellos, vibraphones, electric organs, and God knows what other instruments formerly undreamed of in the Great Smokies or on the banks of the Apalachicola. It was this kind of music I heard as I gained the landing on my floor, realizing, half-deafened and astonished, that it was emanating from my own room.
    Ding-dong Daddy, whatcha doin’ to me—
    I had become spoiled. Having lived for weeks as the sole occupant of a room designed for two, I had all but forgotten the possibility of a roommate—who plainly had just movedin. As a matter of fact, his efficiency was such that he had already been inspired to add his name to the card on the frame of the door, and below my name had neatly printed his identification:
    S ECOND L T . D ARLING P. J EETER , J R ., USMC
    Bemused, I gazed at the card for some time, struck by the cadence of the name itself, which I tested several times on palate and tongue, but also by the absence, at the end of “USMC,” of an “R,” designating a reserve. And my spirits sank as I realized that come what may I had drawn a regular. I opened the door, the music boomed forth:
Ding-dong Daddy, whatcha doin’ to me—
Had me jumpin’ an’ a-humpin’ till half past three—
    And I beheld, seated at the desk naked but for his green skivvy drawers, stamping out time to the cretinous song with bare feet, a stocky, muscular young man of twenty-one or twenty-two with acne scars on his cheeks and shoulders, wire-rimmed spectacles, straw-colored hair clipped to a half-inch skinhead cut, and—largely due to a wet, protuberant lower lip and an exceptionally meager forehead—an expression of radiant vacuity. If this description seems more than reasonably unfavorable, it is because I mean it to be, since nothing my roommate did or said during the course of our acquaintanceship diminished that first impression of almost unprecedented loutishness.
    “Howdy,” he said, rising and turning down his phonograph, coming forward to shake my hand. I noticed that he had pushed the proofs of my novel somewhat aside on the desk, also my dictionary and several other of the few books I had brought with me—Oscar Williams’s modern Americanverse anthology and the Viking Portable Dante were two I remember—and these now shared space with a mountainous pile of phonograph records, presumably of the order of “Ding-dong Daddy,” three long, unsheathed, murderous-looking blue-steel knives, a stack of “men’s” magazines (True, Argosy , and the like), a box of Baby Ruth candy bars, and a random assortment of toilet articles including, I could not help but notice, a large cellophane-wrapped pack of fancy condoms known as “wet skins.”
    He gave me a firm grip. “Name’s Darling Jeeter,” he declared in a hearty voice, clearly that of an Ole Country Boy. “Muh friends all call me Dee.”
    I was relieved that he so quickly took care of the name business (he must have had the problem before) since had he not offered me the way out I was prepared to say politely and immediately: “I’m very sorry but I cannot possibly call you Darling.” For although the patronymic is certainly venerable enough (was it mere whimsy that led Barrie to give that honored name to the family in Peter Pan?) , and although to christen one’s offspring with a family name is a common enough practice throughout the South (my roommate, as it turned out, hailed from down in Florence,